The solution according to one or more embodiments of the present invention relates to the data processing field. More specifically, this solution relates to the access to hypertext documents.
Hypertext documents are commonly used to facilitate the access to information of various kinds. The example by antonomasia of application of the hypertext documents is the web in the Internet (wherein billion of web pages are linked one to another). In this way, a user may navigate (or surf) in the Internet by means of a browser, which allows retrieving, rendering and traversing the web pages.
A problem of the Internet is the difficulty in finding the actual information of interest among the huge amount of web pages that are available. For this purpose, the user generally accesses the web page of a search engine for retrieving a list of web pages that best match selected keywords. The user may then open the web pages that seem to be more promising (for example, as indicated by a corresponding summary or preview in the list) by clicking on corresponding hyperlinks. The user may then move forwards each opened web page through other hyperlinks.
Particularly, modern browsers generally have a Tabbed Document Interface (TDI), wherein multiple web pages may be opened in corresponding tabbed panes of a single window provided with corresponding tabs to switch among them. An example of tabbed browser is described in US-A-2006/0271858 (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference). Moreover, US-A-2010/0070928 (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference) discloses a technique for customizing a tab page for opening web pages associated with bookmarks. A further improvement is provided in the browser CHROME by GOOGLE Inc. (trademarks), wherein when a new web page is opened through a hyperlink from a source web page the tabbed pane of the new web page is arranged close to the tabbed pane of the source web page (rather than at the end of the row of tabbed panes). The “Tag Based Window and Tab Management System” document (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference) also proposes tagging tabs and windows so as to allow grouping them for different applications (for example, to facilitate their closure).
A collaborative movement also exists that promotes the implementation of a so-called semantic web. This encourages the inclusion of semantic information in the web pages, in a standard format that should allow its use by machines. For this purpose, several techniques are available for classifying the web pages according to their topics—for example, as described in US-A-2010/0228733 (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference).
Moreover, U.S. Pat. No. 7,747,626 (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference) proposes clustering the result of the search returned by the search engine into different categories, and displaying them in separate tabbed panes. US-A-2008/0184158 (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference) instead proposes a technique for identifying browser windows among all the windows that are opened, so as to bring the browser windows into view above the other windows. US-A-2011/0161828 (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference) describes a technique for downloading a new web page into a corresponding tabbed pane in background, so that the user may continue working with another web page already opened. US-A-20100031166 (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference) describes a technique for defining place-marks by the user to create relationships among different web pages, so as to build a new web application with aggregated content taken from different web pages. The “Search Contents in Common Multi-tabbed Browser” document (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference) proposes a search function for selected keywords that is applied to multiple tabbed panes of a window.
In any case, the search of the desired information requires quite complex operations of browsing in the Internet. The browsing is substantially based on heuristic and opportunistic strategies, which strongly depend on the recognition of the required information by the user. As a result, it is very common that the user opens several instances of the browser in corresponding windows, each one with several tabbed panes for corresponding web pages. Moreover, it may happen that the same web page is opened more times or that several web pages with similar contents are opened over time.
This causes a proliferation of the web pages, especially when different searches are performed concurrently. Therefore, it is quite difficult to find the web pages actually relating to each search; this is particularly annoying for the user (which may spend significant time to identify a web page that was found beforehand and left opened somewhere, maybe in a different window). Moreover, when a specific search is not of interest any longer, its web pages have to be closed individually; however, this operation is quite time consuming (since it requires identifying and closing each one these web pages manually).